Does A Local Therapist Need A Blog, or Should They Focus on Main Service Pages?
-
Hi everyone!
I am just starting to practice SEO by assisting a friend with her local relationship therapy practice, and I'm not sure whether or not she needs a blog.
Here's the content they currently have:
- A page for specific categories within relationship therapy (unmarried couples, marriage, divorce, pre-marital, etc)
- On each page, she describes what that type of therapy is, what clients can expect, and how she will help them during the process.
My question is this:
- Does it make sense to start a blog, or, is it better to build out the main, static service pages with more content?
I'm worried that if she does start a blog, that it could potentially take away from the authority of the main service pages.
For example, let's say she writes a highly specific post titled "how to talk to your husband about marriage". Is it better to just incorporate aspects of this post on the main marriage page, or keep it as a blog post?
I really appreciate any suggestions and I'm happy to answer any questions.
-
Hi Onitamara!
Good discussion going on here. I'll add a few big picture thoughts:
How much content (whether in the form of pages or posts) the therapist will want to build should be determined by 3 things:
- How much she enjoys sharing what she knows and how much time she has to devote to writing
- How helpful this will be to the public both in terms of informing them, and transforming them into clients
- How competitive her market is
If she likes to write, this is a good start, and if she is a good writer, it's an even better one. And, of course, she needs to have the time.
The true usefulness of the content will determine how much it impacts both the lives of the readers and the financial bottom line of the therapist. The true usefulness will also gradually impact Google's perception of the website as an authoritative source on its topics.
The happy medium being aimed for is to publish enough content to attain the bookings and rankings the therapist ideally desires, but not going overboard beyond that. So, for example, if the therapist is located in a small, rural area, she may discover that writing two blog posts a month is all it takes for her to become competitively ranked and to have a full patient roster. But, if her practice is in a metropolis, the effort she'll need to put into being ranked and booked is likely to be much, much greater. Because of this, it's smart to assess the competitive landscape the therapist is entering, and to implement as much tracking as possible to help determine how much content (pages or posts) is needed to meet goals, and how that content is assisting in those goals being met.
Finally, as Ed is mentioning, it's important that your most important pages are the easiest to find, by means of your internal linking structure. In other words, the therapist's page on "Couples Therapy" will likely be one you're internally linking to more prominently than a single article she wrote about "How to Apologize Sincerely" or something like that.
In the long run, though, the decision to create a blog or a library of static articles should be based on the therapist's desire to share, the need to use content as a vehicle for client education and conversion, and the unique competitive landscape in which the practice is operating.
-
Thanks! Drop me a line directly (email is in profile) I'm not a consultant and don't charge people but if you have particular difficulties than I can get right in there with you. SEO for services (especially local ones) is a minefield sometimes. But be open, honest and answer the questions you get asked the most at work and google will reward you whether it's super-duper schema-marked up with a ton of links or whether it's just the best article from an expert with some letters after her name who knows what she's talking about. Google prefers the latter. So much content today is written by people with no education. Show them your therapist went to College and has some authority and you'll out rank them all - even from powerful domains.
-
That's an extremely important and pertinent question. So i've identified that `Veneers' and 'Veneers Prices' are two separate topics in the eyes of google. So this page is doing really well On the other hand 'Dental Implant Prices' and 'Dental Implants' are considered by google to be in the same 'topic'. So I did have a dental implants price blog but it just didn't rank and I suspected it also pulled my dental implants page down the rankings with internal competition.
So I made it into a glossy PDF and now have it as a download on my dental implants page and we're now ranking better for dental implants price/cost.
It can be difficult to determine what's a topic and what isn't a topic and what to bundle together and keep seperate and i'll be honest, I've done lots of research and testing to get our high dental rankings. Go with your gut and use google by searching for different things and seeing what comes up on the top pages.
As for the linking question, pagerank sculpting is dead. If it's useful for someone to navigate off a page and to another page then have a link. More the merrier I always think and I've never seen any differences trying to squeeze all my traffic down highways on my website that i've devised. Let people do what they want and then use the insights to make the page better.
This idea of 'Leaky landing pages' (something TOTALLY DIFFERENT from direct response advertising) has somehow gotten itself over to SEO but it doesn't matter. I'd link in both directions if it's appropriate and you think it will help people not to get stranded or stuck on your site. There's always the navigation if they are feeling like they don't know where to go next. and if you use something like hotjar you can see where they are going to by using the navigation and bang a link in there to make life easier.
What you MUST do though is have all the little sub-categories linking into the main category like spokes on a wheel. This tells google that's the main category. But you'll still see loads of people landing on the spokes and navigating in and rarely the other way around at first.
So say, 'this article is about how to not be passive-aggressive' if you are looking at how to calm aggressive partners, maybe check this out [how to calm an argument] etc with anchor text, so google know's what that article means. Use exact anchor text. You're not going to get into trouble for that. You can even occasionally use the local identifier. I've not gotten any heat for that. So visit our main page here: "Dental Implants Liverpool" Depends whether you're more interested in local or national rankings to start you off.
If you think this is helpful please mark it as a helpful answer. Then I get love from Moz.
-
Thank you, Ed, that's extremely helpful!
I see the benefit of linking to a static service page from a related blog post. A quick clarification I'm wondering about; I'll use your veneers example.
Does your main veneers page include a link to the "veneers price" blog post? Or, and with any other service, have you found more success only linking in one direction?
I'm curious if linking in both directions versus one has any noticeable impact on link equity or conversions.
-
Also from a linking perspective you're much more likely to be able to get links to a blogpost answering a great question about relationships than to a page on how smart you are and that you have a pHD and can save a marriage. So getting links is also important and blogs are the way to do that. It's called 'linkworthy content' for outreach.
-
OK so I have a dentists. So we basically do the same thing from a digital marketing perspective. We make users trust us and then get them to come in for a consultation, pay us and begin a trusting relationship where we listen to their problems and heal them.
Blogs are Extremely important. The things you need to remember are that blogs can be written about specific topics and subjects (how do I talk to my husband) (why doesn't he take out the trash) all the little things that people will be googling when they need an answer to a question but don't necessarily think they need a relationship councillor.
So structure your main pages into main topics: her, him, confrontations, sex etc. and then think of 'sub-topics' and questions specifically surrounding these main topics. Then link (with anchor text) from your blogs to your main service pages with links, opt-in boxes and all the other ways you'll find out about when you research writing a blog. Also use the blog to get people to sign up for your newsletter and join your social media groups.
Some of your main traffic sources will be your blog and it's native content that you own so you can run ads on it - for yourself - right there in the copy.
So to give you an example, we have a veneers page. It has on it everything you need to know if you want to come in and buy veneers. But we also have a 'Veneers price' blogpost and this gets 100x more traffic and it talks about all the different ins and outs of prices and how much different types of veneers cost. Throughout that piece are sentences like, "If you're interested to come for an appointment to discuss composite veneers then click here to see our main services page "composite veneers" This tells google that your main page is the most important and you'll not get internal competition if you think about the data architecture and site structure of the main pages and blogs carefully. Use FAQ's at the end of your main pages or blogs to pick up other questions and mark them up to get better CTR in the SERPS and more exposure to potential patients.
I ended up in a funnel for a South African Guy with a site called 'love at first fight' because I typed in 'why does my wife get so irate about me not putting the bins out the day before the cleaner is coming' and ended up learning so much, subscribing to his newsletters and almost hiring him! (the answer is basically that if she can't trust you with the bins - an easy job - then how can she trust you doing the Digital Marketing for her dental practice.
Hope this makes sense. But Blog. Get writing. Right now!! lol.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Improving Local Pack results across other services
A company I work for ranks well in the Local Pack under its primary service offering i.e. "primary service Bristol". And also under some other services it offers. However, under other services that are offered, it doesn't show in the local pack despite ranking No 1 in the natural SERPS for the target phrase "example service Bristol". We have pages covering all main services in the main site navigation bar. Is this just the way it is or can something be done to resolve this? Does the detail in the third-party citations have a significant impact? What about the content of the reviews? I note that we are doing better under the services mentioned within the reviews. Should I add additional categories and emulating those used by the competition under the search terms? Or am I missing something else?
Local Website Optimization | | GrouchyKids0 -
Using the Onpage Grader for Local Business websites
Hey Guys, Curious how people use the onpage grader for optimizing pages for local businesses specifically, I'm interested if people use keywords with or without a geo modifier since adding a geo modifier will prevent more natural writing to increase the score. If you don't use a geo modifier do you have some general rules of the city that needs to be in the H1 and first paragraph etc. Any tips for using the page grader for local businesses would be great Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | solidlocal0 -
Multiple service area pages that rank well. However the primary keyword page tends to bounce around between the pages. How can I stabalise the ranking to the primary page
We have multiple service area pages attached to the primary keyword for the site which arent in the navigation and we have the primary page which is in the navigation. Currently Google is choosing different service area pages to rank for the primary keyword so the rankings bounce around a lot for the keyword when it doesn't have a service area target in it. Eg work shirts vs work shirts brisbane.
Local Website Optimization | | jonathan.k0 -
Local Strategy for Multiple Domain Integration
Hello, We are a locally driven business with two locations. Currently, each location has its own local site and are linked to from our central domain (3 domains total). We are discussing whether we should integrate the local sites into location pages on our core domain. However, we would also prefer to keep the ‘local’ domains live. Is this a viable strategy and what would we need to do to ensure the local sites won’t cannibalize our efforts with the main domain? Also, should we remove the contact information on those local sites to avoid NAP issues? The other option would be to build out the local domains but that could raise concerns over budget and potentially expanding into the future. And we would like the main domain to take presendence. A few additional notes on this: Each location has its own brand name and contact information. Traffic across all 3 sites is about the same. We are also considering using silos with sub-folders to build out local service pages. We understand how to set up location pages but are asking more in terms of overall strategy and ideal way to position all 3 sites. Any help or insight would be very appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Local Website Optimization | | Ben-R
Best,0 -
Local SEO Over Optimization
We are targeting a bunch of services for our local business that works in and around their location. I'm concerned about over optimization and need some guidance on whether these points should be resolved. The company is based in a city and works mostly in the city but also in the surrounding areas. Currently, the site has 6 services pages (accessible via main nav) targeting the same location i.e. “Made Up Service London”, “Imaginary Service London” (with URLs and H1 tags etc. in place containing this location). However this is soon going to become 9 services pages, I am concerned that the repetition of this one location is starting to look spammy, especially as its where the company is based. Initially, I also wanted pages targeting the same services in other nearby areas. For example “Made Up Service Surrey”, “Imaginary Service Essex”. This has not happened as the info available has been too sporadic. I was going to add links to relevant case studies into these pages to beef up the content and add interest. To that end, we came up with case studies, but after a while, I noticed that these are also largely focused on the primary location. So out of 32 case studies, we have 19 focused on the primary location again with URL’s and H1 tags etc containing the location keyword. So in total, we have 25 pages optimized for the location (soon to be 28 and more if further case studies are added). My initial feeling was that the inclusion of pages targeting services in other locations would legitimize what we have done with the main pages. But obviously we have not got these pages in place and I question whether we ever will. What is my best course of action moving forward?
Local Website Optimization | | GrouchyKids1 -
Do I need to change my country og:locale to en_AE
Hi MOZ, I have a site that is aimed at the English speaking market of the United Arab Emirates. The language tag is currently set to lang="en-GB" and the og:locale also set to en_GB. The domain is a .com and aimed at the whole world. Should I be trying to target en-AE and en_AE for these tags instead of GB?
Local Website Optimization | | SeoSheikh0 -
Applying NAP Local Schema Markup to a Virtual Location: spamming or not?
I have a client that has multiple virtual locations to show website visitors where they provide delivery services. These are individual pages that include unique phone numbers, zip codes, city & state. However there is no address (this is just a service area). We wanted to apply schematic markup to these landing pages. Our development team successfully applied schema to the phone, state, city, etc. However for just the address property they said VIRTUAL LOCATION. This checked out fine on the Google structured data testing tool. Our question is this; can just having VIRTUAL LOCATION for the address property be construed as spamming? This landing page is providing pertinent information for the end user. However since there is no brick and mortar address I'm trying to determine if having VIRTUAL LOCATION as the value could be frowned upon by Google. Any insight would be very helpful. Thanks
Local Website Optimization | | RosemaryB1 -
Local SEO: City & County Pages
I'm working on developing some local pages for an HVAC company. They cover two counties, so I was planning on having two county pages, then linking them to individual city pages to keep the menu simpler and not cluttering it up with a couple dozen city pages for people to slog through. Has anybody ever done county pages before for local SEO? Or at least seen them? Just curious to see if there's any real benefit overall for have separate county pages, or if I should just stick to city pages.
Local Website Optimization | | ChaseMG0